Following the vandalizing of Hong Kong's legislature on Monday, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt urged the city's authorities to understand the root causes of what happened which according to him was a deep-seated concern by people in Hong Kong that their basic freedoms are under attack.

Laying aside the facts that under the discriminatory British colonial rule the majority of Hong Kong's residents never enjoyed the freedoms they do today and that there was no right to take to the streets, and that Britain no longer has any responsibility for the governance of Hong Kong or any supervisory rights, let's do as he urged and look at the root causes of the violent protests.

Which is simply that the ideologues in Western governments never cease in their efforts to engineer unrest against governments that are not to their liking, even though their actions have caused misery and chaos in country after country in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Now they are trying the same trick in China.

The aim is simple, as is the strategy: They are trying to exploit Hong Kong's different system and its proximity to the Chinese mainland to instigate unrest against the SAR government as a means to put pressure on the central government.

The city, a freewheeling commercial hub, would have escaped their attentions had it not been a high-profile special administrative region of the People's Republic of China, with a special dispensation for its different social and economic system to remain in place for a transition period after the return of sovereignty to China.

The root cause of the unrest, although they will never admit it, is that feeling growing anxiety about China's rise, the ideologues in the US and its acolytes feel compelled to try and contain it, and they are not wasting any opportunity to put pressure on it through inciting unrest in the SAR.

They have been the maneuverers behind the "Occupy Central" campaign in 2014, the Mong Kok riot in 2016 and the latest anti-government campaign riding on the controversy over the extradition law amendments. Indeed, it is now an open secret that some of the Occupy masterminds received special training from foreign forces before they kicked off the Occupy campaign in the fall of 2014.

The violent behavior that these Western agitators are emboldening tramples on the rule of law in Hong Kong and undermines its social order. But, of course, so long as it suits their purpose, they have no qualms about what the collateral damage might be.

Monday should have been a day to celebrate Hong Kong's return to the motherland, instead it was used by some as an excuse to tarnish the image of Hong Kong and to smear the central government.